Fisheries Committee on March 10th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Fast.

We will now go to Mr. Morrissey.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Chair.

Each year on B.C. rivers, how many events occur that must be managed by DFO? I mean natural events that cause a disruption to rivers, any event that's natural and interferes with the water flow or salmon movement on the rivers.

[Rebecca Reid]

From a slide perspective, I'm familiar with several, but it's just a handful.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Is that on a yearly basis?

[Rebecca Reid]

Yes.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Did I hear you correctly that the only previous slide event of this nature occurred in 1914?

[Rebecca Reid]

That's an equivalent comparison, yes.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Could you explain it to us then? How is the department prepared to deal with these events? Do you have a specific section of the department that's constantly responsible for responding to events?

[Rebecca Reid]

In this event, the department doesn't have an incident command system in place.

We rely on the Canadian Coast Guard's expertise. In this particular incident, we worked with the B.C. Wildfire Service and the Canadian Coast Guard, which are trained and have teams available to respond to emergencies, not normally of this nature but in this case they showed up.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Are they the primary division charged with preparing for how you're going to respond to it?

[Rebecca Reid]

No, I would say that they showed up based on the urgency on an exceptional basis, based on our requests.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Okay.

In an answer to an earlier question by my colleague Mr. Arnold, you referenced that this made a bad situation worse. You referenced 2009 and I was wondering why. In the year 2009, you indicated that the predicted salmon spawn, I take it, did not materialize.

[Rebecca Reid]

I misspoke. I intended to say 2019.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

That was 2019. Okay, so there was no event that occurred back at that particular time.

Again, going back to the situation, the department exhausted all resources that it could to carry out work that was practical at that time. Am I correct in that?

[Rebecca Reid]

That's correct.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

There wasn't anything else that would be physically capable of being done to remediate the situation that would have had a more positive impact on the salmon run.

[Rebecca Reid]

We did everything we could, and we reached out to every expert we could find to seek advice on how best to respond.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

You're going to continue that course as we go forward—

[Rebecca Reid]

We are.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

—until...? When will you determine, or how will you determine that you have now achieved returning the river to as close a preslide water flow situation as possible?

Could you walk us through that a bit?

[Rebecca Reid]

We have a consultant who is an expert in such matters, who does have the capability to scan the riverbed and to evaluate the rocks that are there and to model the impact of those rocks.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

I believe you showed us this one.

How far away have you determined we are from reaching preslide conditions?

Is that a fair question? Do you know that?

[Rebecca Reid]

If you can see in this picture where it goes smooth and then rough, there's sort of a lip of rock that's still there that's been modelled that will be causing an impediment to fish passage. We need to be able to reach that lip, that rock, and remove it, and right now we are unable to reach it.

That's the winter work.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

You're unable to reach it at present. When do you anticipate reaching it?

[Rebecca Reid]

The plan would be to.... Because we're going to run out of time because of the freshet, we'll need to come back in the winter when the water is low again and continue to do rock work.